


Stolen Idols

by herworship429



Category: Star Wars: Rebels
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-07
Updated: 2017-04-07
Packaged: 2018-10-15 21:16:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,530
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10557828
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/herworship429/pseuds/herworship429
Summary: All at once he sees himself- the conqueror and his golden idols, and every one of them seem to stare and seethe and whisper… you know, they tell him in low, vicious voices, but you will never understand.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Little ditty about Thrawn. Spoilers for the season 3 finale. Mostly canon, with a slight mention of Legends stuff.

It was not often the specter of failure haunted the man who had become known as Grand Admiral Thrawn. Faithful servant of his Emperor… and yet, he wished dearly that Palpatine would not suffer such fools as those with whom he had been expected to work. Konstantine and Pryce had fallen victim to the sins of pride and anger, and for that Thrawn found the sour taste of defeat on his tongue.

Most would not call this day a defeat, of course, but Thrawn was not most people. Yes, they had dealt a crushing blow to the rebels, but _none_  of those ships should have gotten through, those Mandalorians should never have shown themselves, and none of the rebel leaders, so thoroughly caught in Thrawn’s trap, should ever have been able to escape. His plan had been flawless. His strategy was sound. Of course, no plan ever survived contact with the enemy, but this day should not have transpired as it had.

What was it Kallus had told him? A reminder of all the occasions of the former ISB agent’s failure, a warning that these rebels had a habit of seizing victory from the jaws of certain defeat… Thrawn held that wisdom could be found in even the least likely of places, and that almost all opinions were worth hearing at least once, even if they proved useless. Perhaps he should not have discarded Kallus’s warning so brusquely after all.

But these things were not what truly haunted him as he returned to his quarters, as he removed his armor and made his way through his gallery towards the training room. He almost started at the sight of the Jedi Temple Guard’s mask, projected onto a slab of grey stone in the corner of the room. For an instant, he’d forgotten that he’d moved it there; at the time, it had amused him to do so, and really, what better place for such a relic, even just the hologram, than in his dojo? But now as the blank grey slits of the mask stared back at him, Thrawn resisted the sudden, irrational urge to find the controls and remove the hologram from the room.

He was a strategist. _The_ strategist. He had been so long before agents of the Empire had found him in exile and given him new purpose; he would continue to be so, even if the Empire itself crumbled. Such an outcome was outlandish, as of yet. Perhaps not impossible, but unlikely in the extreme, and this petty, meager rebellion would certainly not be the thing to bring about the end. And yet… and yet, the words of the thing that called itself the Bendu lingered like a trap in the back of Thrawn’s mind, a trap ready to be sprung. A single seed of doubt had been planted, and try as he might to ignore it, to fight it, he knew it would only grow. Perhaps if he had been able to explain this impossible… no, creature wasn’t the right word. Thrawn wasn’t entirely sure that ‘being’ was accurate either. It had been sentient, but unlike anything Thrawn had ever encountered. And powerful… yes, it had been powerful. Thrawn was not foolish enough to believe that he had killed it. The source of that awesome power, though… that troubled him.

Of course, he could hardly deny the existence of the energy field the Jedi and the Sith called ‘the Force’; he had studied it, as he had all the strange new things he had encountered in this galaxy. Physical science told him of strange readings and incredible energies generated from the crystals the Jedi had used to power their weapons, of microscopic creatures they called ‘midi-chlorians’ who seemed capable of harnessing and channeling that energy within living beings. He had met Jedi knights, and lords of the Sith, he had seen their impossible feats of strength, hypnotism, their hard-learned swordsmanship. He had listened to their philosophies, lessons about morality, light and dark, and balance; the Jedi with their determined calm, the Sith with their wild impulsiveness. There were others, other stories, other lessons to be learned, other names for the same… Force. He had yet to encounter a race, culture or planet that did not feature some version of it in their myths and legends and history. The Kiffar believed that one in every hundred of their kind was capable of some psychic tracking talent; legends of the Lasat had spoken of the Ashla, a power of good and light in the galaxy, and a mythical sanctuary of their people long lost; an order of monks on the moon of Jedha once protected glittering temples built to honor kyber crystals; tales about a dark and terrible world called Dathomir, home to a race of Force-wielding witches, had found their way to him, a place where the planet itself seemed shrouded in the dark side of the Force; the paintings and primitive star maps that had led him to the rebels’ base on Atollon had been accompanied by myths from cultures all over the sector, all telling tale of a world lost to time, hidden by a great power; even the Emperor, on the rare occasion that Thrawn had spoken with him alone, had wanted to know all Thrawn knew of the Unknown Regions, and of some great, dark power he seemed to believe resided there.

Thrawn, of course, had known little outside the Ascendency. He had certainly never met a being with some kind of… magical power. Not until he had encountered the Jedi. The Sith. And now this… this Bendu. A creature who somehow managed to generate and control a storm like nothing Thrawn had ever seen, direct lightening to specific targets, who seemed to be a friend to the Jedi Kanan Jarrus, and yet who had tried to kill him and his friends as eagerly as it had tried to destroy Thrawn’s men.

The light _and_ the dark, it had said. The spirit of the balance. The one in the middle.

Of course, it had said many things. Why should he believe any of them?

For all that he could acknowledge some aspects of the Force-devout and their mystical ramblings, there were some things that he simply could not believe could be real. Tricks and mind games, surely that's all it was. Surely the Bendu, and those like him, could not see the future. Surely only the weakest of minds could be lead to believe they had been brainwashed by a voice and a gesture. Surely there was some explanation for what he had seen on Atollon. 

His office had been outfitted with all that he knew, all that he had been studying about these rebels, and seated at his desk, he could see them all clearly. The better to watch, to examine, the better to understand his prey… there was Sabine Wren’s cacophony of color splashed across a slab of shattered duracrete; with an amused sneer, he’d taken to calling it _the Starbird Rising_. Now that name was too much, too close to something like the truth. One of the helmets that Bridger was so fond of collecting from his enemies, also painted, sat on a nearby pedestal. There was the Syndulla kalikori. The memory of the Temple Guard mask in the other room hung like a ghost alongside the others. It all seemed to close in on all sides, mocking him. Not just those he had taken to study the Ghost and her crew. No, it was the collection he had stored in his apartments back on Coruscant as well, all the art he had collected his wide travels in the galaxy.

All at once he saw himself as _they_ saw him, the rebels and every other enemy or foe he had faced, every stranger from whom he had ever taken something; he had always thought himself the good and worthy opponent, because he took to time to study, to see, to _collect_... but now he could see himself prattling on about art and history, and _understanding_ your enemy, even as he sat surrounded by stolen relics from a dozen or more cultures whom he had helped to subjugate, or enslave, or destroy- the conqueror and his golden idols, and every one of them seem to stare and seethe and whisper… _you know_ , they tell him in low, vicious voices, _you know, but you are not one of us. And you will_ never _understand_.

Perhaps the thing that Thrawn, or at least the small, dark, helpless part of him that could still feel such things, feared most of all was that they were right after all. And that one day, the spirit of this galaxy he had inadvertently invaded and robbed would come looking for retribution for all he had stolen from it in the name of the Empire.

He reached for the controls for his holographic gallery, and switched them off one by one. For the first time in a very long time the man once known as Mitth'raw'nuruodo wished, not for the stolen idols of a thousand alien worlds, but for that which had long ago been taken from _him_.


End file.
